Cowboy Confessional

I posted a rough hack of a 2003 song I wrote when I first subjected myself to the irony of Internet dating … and all the psychotic dementia that can induce.

Titled “Electronic Love” there is enough innuendo to make the lyrics amusing. For anyone who has seen how the net can both enhance and cripple relationships, the rest of the song will be a painful reminder.

This rough hack is very dirty sounding due to my over experimentation with the recording equipment. But there is one lesson that came out during the production of this test piece, namely experiment with everything!

The lead guitar didn’t have a sound I liked, and while pondering what to do I kept clicking through the various effects that were packaged with the digital audio workstation software (Sonar Studio if you are curious). There was one item in the effects list I had not noticed before, and it was a guitar effect rack simulator called Revalver. When it opened I saw a classic 19″ rack loaded with gear in just the way old analog musicians are used to. A quick experiment with the presents and I found a grungy effect that isn’t exactly what I want, not it is 90% closer than what I had.

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I hacked out a slightly different version of Cajun Queen over the weekend. It is still a work in progress and I sorely need to find a better drummer than me. For a song that was whelped as a solo slide guitar piece, this tune is evolving in unexpected ways.

There are parallels for writers. I chatting with Dear Old Dad over the weekend. He started writing his first book and got stuck constructing the outline, having no idea where he was going with his memoir (the old man is leading a damn interesting life). He has lots of good stories to tell but he didn’t know what the theme and point of his book would be.

Sometimes the written word is like a song that you are monkeying with in studio. In Cajun Queen I knew something was missing — it did not sound complete. I started grabbing the odd and assorted percussion instruments laying about. Not liking tambourines much at all I grabbed that last.

Much to my dismay it was exactly what I needed.

My advice to Pop was to write nothing but different high-level outlines no deeper than two levels. I suggested organizing each outline around different centers of topic. After hacking through three or four, he would start to see patterns emerge — common themes that would tie the book together. I also suggested starting at the end — finding the one story that made the biggest impression on him personally — and opening the book with it. That would automagically set the tone and theme tight away.

Cajun Queen is a case study of setting the tone. As originally performed, it was a slash-and-burn blues bit focusing on slide guitar riffs, which themselves were much different than what has now been recorded. But for some unexplained reason I wanted conga drums in the song and laid that track first. That changed the center — the focus — of the song leading to the dueling guitars you hear now.

Sometimes you gotta go where the universe tells you to go.

I hope Dad starts his memoir with a meeting he had. It was with a colonel who serving in Vietnam during that troubled little war. Dad and his band of engineers worked some typical magic, rigging up motion detectors and shoving them into bamboo stalks (bamboo in Nam is about the size of a man’s thigh and grows tall enough to obscure the sun). At night, huey choppers would fly down the Ho Chi Minh trail tossing sharp-ended bamboo stalks loaded with Dad’s invention along the trail. These electronic stalks could discern the difference between an ox cart or an infantry division rolling down the road. They could tell the difference between marching boots and tank treads. The bamboo would radio this intelligence to U.S. commanders.

After a very business-like briefing, the colonel came over to my old man and said “We see them coming now. You saved a lot of my men’s lives. Thanks.”

Now that’s a theme we all can live with.

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A hacked out a new song this week — a love ballad about broken people in and around the rodeo circuit. Imagine like Tom Waits banging Conway Twitty.

It is called Eli’s, and there is a very rough sketch demo track online.

There is a minor lesson in song construction here (though this tune is far from complete). While pondering the lyrics I had the melody of a famous country song in my head, and kept stitching to words together with those sounds.

That’s wrong on many levels, possibly illegal, and might well be against church doctrine to boot.

So when it came time to write music, I had to force a chord structure completely different to what was echoing in my skull. It did not matter what chords I started using, because they were throw-aways (and sure enough, I ended up with completely different ones). Same with the meter, melody, etc.

Another songwriting tactic I used in this song was a common one, but I liked the way it worked here. The stanzas are in major chords, and the change-ups are in minors. Since I wanted negative emotions in the change-ups — to drive the feeling that life sucks and doesn’t get better — minor chords created that feeling.

Enough of my rambling (Jack Elliot I ain’t). Enjoy, and if you don’t … keep it to yourself.

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I just returned from a wonderful and sweaty weekend of camping, jamming, and listening at the Strawberry Music Festival.  And from this I may have fallen out of love with Lucinda Williams.

Don’t get me wrong.  She’s a nice enough sort, and if like me you love gritty tunes that sag from pain, she can belt out a few that will hurt you.  But during her set on Saturday, she admitted to writing one which highlights a major songwriting mistake — something budding tune tailors should avoid.

She sang a yet-to-be-released tune called “Honey Bee”, which in an uncharacteristic turn is an upbeat ditty about her being in love.  With any luck it won’t last, because she should not be allowed to write songs when she’s in a good mood (at the same event, Harry Manx quipped “The blues isn’t about feeling bad.  It’s about making other people feel bad.”)

“Honey Bee” is a concatenation of cliches and predictable references.  I recall one verse going something like My sweet honey bee, I’m so glad you stung me.  It got worse from there.  This is not the worst example of cliche claptrap with a score.  A one-record group called Bloodline (who musically were an extremely talented bunch) were notorious for cliche abuse, including one tune called “The Good Luck You’re Having”, which contained an unbroken string of of that crud (I’m suspicious by nature I guess, hold my hand close to my vest).

The problem with cliches or with Williams-like obvious rhymes is that the audience is always disappointed (my two camp mates looked at each other, then at me, and groaned audibly when Williams sang the bee/stung line).  Audiences always listen to the words, and want something that is at least interesting (which doesn’t explain pop music, but then again nothing could).  Surprising the audience with the unexpected or a unique twist on the old line keeps their attention.  Think Tom Waits or James McMurtry.

When writing/revising a song, you should examine each lyric and kill anything when has been said by everyone else.  If you used a line that you heard from a friend, a neighbor, or on a TV sitcom, then end that lyric’s life without mercy.

It can even get down to a single word.  An A&R buyer once listened to my song One Heartbreak Away from the Grave, and said the use of the word “babe” was too predictable in a blues song.  He’s correct (though not so correct that I’ve bothered to rewrite that bit).  One word can kill the ownership of an audience, breaking the storyteller’s spell.

Sorry Lucinda.

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I was at a songwriter’s event in Berkeley (and what the Sam Hell an ex-cowboy is doing in Berkeley, California is another question altogether) when a competition judge warned the participants “You’ll stand a better chance if your song has a bridge.”

Being cut of rough cloth, I thought this notion absurd and an insult to songwriters who have avoided bridges like they would avoid cheap whiskey (which describes mainly me, though bridgeless folk like Tom Waits come to mind too). 

A bridge is just another tool, and by itself does not make a song better or worse.  But it is a tool to change the audiences expectations and add variety.  Like a drummer who knows when to drop a beat in order to get the audience to anticipate a changing verse, a bridge establishes a change in the song, and breaks up musical monotony.

But necessary?  No more necessary that tits on a nun.

Take one extreme example, James McMurty’s Choctaw Bingo.  Search all you like, you will never find a bridge in the entire song which rivals a Wagner opera in length.  McMurty uses other devises to keep energy and audience attention, including interludes between stanzas that foreshadow lyrical reentry, and lyrics that rivet attention.

Bridges have their use, and should not be discounted.  But almost every pop-tune has a bridge and nobody remembers pop-tunes a year after they hit the top ten (well, aside from the Beatles … but that’s a whole different side of beef on which to chew).  Writing a good song requires writing the words and music that convey the emotion you want people to feel, and even the longest bridge won’t cross a chasm between your concealed emotion and a bored audience.

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